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As Windows Phone came up with Windows Phone 8.1 update last year it came up with 2 different platforms to work on , silverlight and WinRT, thus making it a bit tough to keep up with the latest api documentation and maps are not different.

As I have written before how to use Maps following MVVM on Windows Phone 8, I’m going to keep today’s one as a bit of a reference to that and will just post segments that you can use as a code sample.

Instantiating a Map in Windows Phone 8.1:

Quiet frankly this is the easiest job here to do actually. Let’s go ahead and start taking things on screenshot. First we need to open a new project targeting Windows Phone 8.1 and name it MapTest. Then I went to my Toolbox and dragged a MapControl in the middle of the Main Grid. I have already changed my map controls HorizontalAlignment and VerticalAlignment to “stretch’ thus allowing the MapControl to be stretched out to the fullest for the whole app.

Usually a map driven app needs an AuthenticationToken to authenticate the map services but we will focus on it later. Let’s go ahead to solution explorer and open Package.appxmanifest and go to Capabilities tab and make sure Location and Internet both of the checkboxes are checked just to make it sure that your app is map capable.

Now we have a green light to use Maps. If you are a fella from Windows Phone 8 development you’ll see now, you don’t have ID_CAP_MAP here to make an app enable to use maps. You only need it to have location capability.

Getting Your Own Location:

Getting your own location is still as straightforward as it was before in Windows Phone 8 era. All you have to do is use the same Geolocator class and it looks like the following:

Now the question remains now is how would you be able to show it on a Map. Now, Windows Phone 8.1 gives you a lot of options to choose from actually here. You can use three specific things here:

MapIcon

XAML controls

Shapes

Using MapIcon:

The first trial we are going to make is using the MapIcon as it is most straight forward. MapIcon is essentially derived from MapElement class, it can be configured by providing a new image to it or it provides a default one. And the declaration is pretty straight forward too.

Now, if you want to provide a specific Image as your MapIcon, include the image in the Assets folder and let’s assume the image name is MapIcon.png. All you have to do is change the Image property of your MapIcon object.

What people actually misinterpret here is usually they compare PushPin with MapIcon and they do have a valid reason to do so because you can achieve the same result by using both of them but in actuality it doesn’t work like so. MapIcons are actually a set of Icons that define different purposes on the map. These are lightweight, so please chose one if you want to use these to show a specific purpose. Now our purpose was to show our current location.

Now let’s put together a method named GetMyLocation() and put all these together and see what happens.

Now, as this goes, you’ll see Ive done some more works too. I’ve changed the center property of the map control because after adding the MapIcon you need your map to focus on that point and this is how you change the center of your map. And the next thing I did is setting DesiredPitch to 0. We will see more on this property later. You definitely have noticed by now that the method is an asynchronous method because the process of locating your position is asynchronous and we’re using our favourite await keyword to make locator.GetGeopositionAsync() to work synchronously inside the method. The last thing you want is to focus to the selected location (My Location) on the map. So Im setting the map view in an async manner using MyMap.TrySetViewAsync function and it takes two parameters, the first one being the point (the geolocation of you) you want to set your view into and the second is a zoom level of the map. It is actually setting the MyMap.ZoomLevel property that ranges from 1 – 20. Higher number means you’re more zoomed thus more closer to the ground. I’ve also used a custom MapIcon.png with a size of 65×65 pixels. Please be careful on this one as the size you chose is the size you get on the Map. Please choose a size that looks good for your purpose. Now lets put the GetMyLocation() method OnNavigatedTo method and thus you get a smooth zooming animation.

Now, couple of things that are missing here is a progress bar showing that the location is being detected and a try catch that detects any exception detecting the location. Plus we need to put our location detection invocation in a button so we can tap it anytime to load our current location anytime. For that we are going to take help of Application Bar.

Now, let’ wrap up the location detection process under a try-catch just to make sure that if anything goes wrong, you’re covered. And as we’d need to show progress please put the following method in MainPage.xaml too.

Using XAML controls over Map is something I really love because I was pretty fond of the PushPin control provided in Windows Phone Toolkit for Windows Phone 8. Usually this approach is more suitable for MVVM approached apps though. And as per this tutorial goes, we’d not got over MVVM just yet (We will cover that too). So, let’s see how you add XAML controls or shapes in a map from codebehind.

Instead of using MapIcon all you have to do know is generate a XAML control/Shape in background and add it on the children list of the map control rather than the MapElements list.

Now, before moving to the next topic, I’d like to address some points in this approach.

You can create your control in codebehind as you want to build it, you can use possibly any XAML control starting from containers like Grid and StackPanels to Shapes like rectangle and Ellipse.

Select a proper size of the shape if you want to use it and it’s better than MapIcons in one sense is that MapIcons are not guaranteed to be viewed.

MapIcon objects are usually added in the MapElements list but this is added in the Map Children collection.

You can define your datatemplate behind and even hook events (We will see this on MVVM approach

You have to select a proper anchor point for your Xaml/Shape pushpin too. It’s actually nothing but a point object in a 2d space. I want my anchor point to be in the center of the sphere. So if I put my sphere in a 2d space and 1 is the max limit in both X and Y axis, you’d find out that (0.5, 0.5) is the center of the sphere. But this 2d co-ordinate system is actually a tad different. Kindly allow me to demonstrate in the following picture:

So, according to this rule, now you can set your anchor point properly according to your xaml control. Just put it on an imaginary 2d grid and find your desired point. left bottom would be (0,1) and right bottom would be (1,1).

If you look closely you will also see we have changed our TrySetViewAsync invocation with some more parameters. Those are heading, pitch (We kept both of them at 0) and the last one is MapAnimationKind that allows you to define what kind of animation you want when setting the view. I personally love the Bow one thus I used that one and it looks like below:

Changing The Map Properties:

The map control itself comes with a lot of properties equipped, let’s see how we can change these for a chance. The first two things we’d love to change is the pitch/tilt and the rotation/heading. For that we’d need to change our layout a bit. Let’s keep the map in the background and put 2 sliders (one horizontal and one vertical) for changing rotation and pitch of the map.

We have introduced 3 rows and columns in the main grid just to keep the whole map in the background and the sliders floating in the top. The horizontal slider would change the Maps rotation and the Vertical Slider would change the Maps pitch. Now the main grid looks like the following:

Now the first thing you’d notice here is I’ve named the sliders accordingly. The horizontal one is called RotationSlider and the vertical one is called PitchSlider. Now, usually what we do is invoke the ValueChanged event and change the Heading or the DesiredPitch of the map. But there is a smarter way to do that. You can create two element bindings to the MyMap and bind the value of the sliders to the specific properties. If you watch carefully you will see that I have set the RotationSlider maximum value to 360 as that is the maximum rotation value and PitchSlider Maximum to 65 as that is the maximum tilt the MapControl allows. Now replace your sliders with the following binding:

Please make it sure the Binding Mode is set to TwoWay so when the map updates the sliders updates too. And without even writing a single backend code the feature is done!

So, that’s a creative use of element binding. Now you could’ve done it even from code backend. All you had to do is go to properties of PitchSlider and RotationSlider and create the ValueChanged method stub. The methods would’ve looked like the following:

Let’s move on and see some of the other features we’d like to test too. Let’s add two checkboxes in the bottom of the map to enable Traffic Flow and Land Marks. We added a horizontal stackpanel and added two checkboxes along with it.

Now, watch carefully the binding written in TrafficFlowVisible property and LandMarksVisible property. All I did here is binded them with the appropriate checkbox IsChecked property and kept the binding mode two way. So, anytime these properties get changed even from codebehind we’ll see the change on the checkbox and vice versa. Traffic Flow is a cool feature actually. See the next gif to get an idea:

Pretty cool huh!

Now you can even write it on the codebehind. You have to go to the properties of any of the checkbox and create the checked and unchecked property stub so you can toggle the maps TrafficFlowVisible feature. From code behind it will look like this:

I still prefer the Element binding because that is extremely easy. There’s one more property named PedestrianFeaturesVisible property. You can try that following the same way here.

Map Appearance:

Map Control is even cool enough to let you select the Map Appearance too! Let’s modify the bottom stackpanel so it can hold more buttons and added a grid with two columns. We added one combobox in each column so we can change map color scheme and map style.

We have added light and dark as the Map Color Scheme in the MapColorBox combobox and we have added 5 different Map Styles on MapStyleBox combobox. Each of the combobox has SelectionChanged event handler hooked up. Let’s see how MapColorBox_SelectionChanged looks like in MainPage.xaml.cs

This looks like the previous one too. All we did here is based on the MapStyleBox SelectedItem we have assigned MyMap.Style to appropriate MapStyle.

Change Map Tile Source:

Now usually what we see is either bing or here maps on Windows Phone 8.1 Map Control. In some cases people might need to access different tile source like openstreet map. For the ones who doesn’t understand what a tilesource is, every map system is nothing but a series of square shaped images/tiles shown for a range of geo coordinate boundary. It’s a grid of images shown based on the maps zoom level. When you zoom out or zoom in or roam around in the map, based on your X,Y and zoom level the map requests tiles of images to show you.

If you want to add/change a tiles layer, you have to change the TileSources collection of the map control. You can set the Zindex, tile pixel size and visibility. You can even forbid/allow stretching of the tiles while a higher resolution tile is being downloaded. You can define layer type of the tile source like BackgroundReplacement, BackgroundOverlay and RoadOverlay.

And after the app is loaded, your map will look like this. But remember as we set our layer to BackgroundReplacement we will not have any kind of map styles or other features like TrafficFlow anymore.

You will also observe the loading of the map is pretty slow as the tiles are loaded from one source. So, we can balance the load by pointing to three different domains so the maps may load faster. All we have to do is rotate the subdomain of openstreet map in between a,b and c

Here in the GetNextDomain method you will see that all it’s doing is it is actually rotating between the three subdomains of openstreet map.

And it looks like below:

Map Events:

Maps in Windows Phone 8.1 comes with much easier touch events. Touch events now comes along with GeoPoint and local UI coordinates related to the touch point. All these comes along with MapTapped, MapDoubleTapped and MapHolding events. To check if a location is visible on current map window you can use IsLocationInView().

We are going to try the MapTapped event for now. Select the MapControl, go over properties, go to event handlers and double click on the MapTapped event handler to create the method stub for that.

Now here we have a sample reverse geocode query. And you can definitely see this is much easier here. You have to use MapLocationFinder class and it has a FindLocationsAtAsync method to get back with a geocoordinate based on your tap on the map. Actually it usually returns a list and we picked the first on the list and printed out the town, district and country on a messagedialog.

you can definitely check how the thing works on the phone

Authenticating a Maps App:

The last thing that is left to do is authenticating a map app. You will see unless you provide a map control a map service AuthenticationToken it keeps asking it in the bottom of the map.